the rise of modern american conservatism a new kind of conservatism: the john birch society 62 ......

A TIME FOR CHOOSING

The Rise of Modern American Conservatism

Jonathan M. Schoenwald

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SEE RUNNING HEAD COPY ix

INTRODUCTION 3

1 THE BIRTH OF POSTWAR CONSERVATISM 14

2 THE COLD WAR HITS HOME 35

3 A NEW KIND OF CONSERVATISM: THE JOHN BIRCH SOCIETY 62

4 THE CASE OF GENERAL EDWIN A. WALKER 100

5 CREATING CONFLAGRATION:BARRY GOLDWATER AND THE REPUBLICAN PARTY 124

6 BUCKLEY FOR MAYOR 162

7 A NEW KIND OF CONSERVATIVE: RONALD REAGAN 190

8 PASSING THE TORCH: ORGANIZATIONS AND ISSUES, 1968–1972 221

CONCLUSION 251

NOTES 267

BIBLIOGRAPHY 315

INDEX 327

CONTENTS

INTRODUCTION

Stamping their feet and rubbing their hands to keep warm, the crowds pa-tiently waited in line to enter the Dallas Memorial Auditorium. The night wasunusually cold, with temperatures well below freezing. Yet the attendance wasimpressive, especially for southerners not used to the frigid air. Almost 6,000Texans had turned up on that December evening in 1961 to hear one of America’smost controversial figures. They would not leave disappointed.

As the applause erupted, Major General Edwin A. Walker strode to the middleof the stage, took his place at the podium, and turned to face his audience. Stand-ing ramrod straight, Walker looked every part the general—except for his clothes.Coat and tie had replaced a chest full of medals accumulated since World War II.When the applause died down, Walker began to speak. Having spent thirty-fourof his fifty-one years in the military, he knew how to command an audience. Aftersome brief opening remarks—including a poetic homage to Texas and its sol-diers—Walker began his sermon:

Tonight I stand alone before you as Edwin A. Walker. I have been chargedwith nothing. I have been found guilty of nothing. I have been punishedfor nothing. . . . I welcome the opportunity to stand before you as the sym-bol of the capability to co-ordinate the inspired and unchallengeable powerof the people with the strength of our military forces. Such unity of pur-pose and spirit would cause an immediate capitulation of Reds and Pinksfrom Dallas to Moscow to Peking.1

Walker’s audience knew to what he referred: he had been admonished by Presi-dent John F. Kennedy for indoctrinating his troops with anticommunist litera-ture and, in response, had quit the corps he had loyally served most of his life.Nodding their heads in agreement, the members of the Dallas audience fre-quently interrupted Walker with applause. Television cameras relayed the speechto those who could not attend. After listening to an hour-long indictment of theKennedy administration, liberalism, and the United Nations, the crowd eruptedin a thunderous ninety-second ovation after which, invigorated, it filed out intothe chilly Texas night.

In late 1961 Edwin Walker represented not just the apparent capitulation ofAmerican liberalism to the enemy but also the birth of a new kind of far-rightconservatism, which the press, moderates, and liberals labeled “extremism.”Extremism scared many Americans. Periodicals contained articles on such top-ics as “Military Control: Can It Happen Here?” and “Crackpots: How They HelpCommunism.”2 Walker even graced the cover of Newsweek with the warning,“Thunder on the Right.”3

4 INTRODUCTION

At the same time, however, Walker represented a dilemma for a burgeoningconservative movement. Those on the far Right demanded action and werewilling to work for it. “Responsible” conservatives, however, wanted the Walkeraffair to disappear as quickly as possible. The threat to the Republican party wasconsiderable, because if it became linked to Walker and others on the far Right,moderates and liberals within the party might flee to the Democrats. But con-servative activists often were loyal, hard-working party members, a constituencycrucial to any winning political operation. The conundrum that had developedby 1961, then, was whether a movement composed of the fraternal twins ofresponsible and extremist conservatism could remain intact and capture a presi-dential nomination. Not surprisingly, like modern American conservatism itself,extremists such as Walker were products of the postwar world.

Shortly after the end of World War II American conservatives launched acrusade to reverse the liberal political and social order prevalent since FranklinD. Roosevelt’s inauguration in 1933. By the 1950s a handful of conservativeintellectuals had delineated a tripartite ideology, out of which activists soon beganforging the backbone of a political movement. In 1964 the Republican nomi-nee, Barry Goldwater, was an avowed conservative who espoused ideology pio-neered during the previous decade. In 1966 former actor and Democrat-turned-conservative-Republican Ronald Reagan became governor of the most populousstate in the nation. And by 1968 enough Americans identified themselves asconservative to elect Richard Nixon as president.

Between 1957 and 1972 conservatives engineered their own revolution. Dis-satisfied with what they perceived as a liberal Republican party, yet knowing theyneeded that same powerful vehicle to deliver their beliefs to the nation, conser-vatives built a movement from the ground up, intent on capturing the GOP. Justas liberalism comprised a wide range of ideas, organizations, and individuals,conservatism was also anything but monolithic.4 Confronting the New DealCoalition in the mid-1960s—at the height of its renaissance as the Great Soci-ety—the conservative coalition included individuals and organizations that es-poused ideas that ranged from outright reaction to pure libertarianism. Thoughsome observers have argued that it was not until the 1970s that conservativecritiques of liberalism became “the basis of an effective political movement bycreating . . . a network of publications, think tanks, and political action commit-tees that have come to rival and often outperform their powerful liberal coun-terparts,” conservatives clearly demonstrated otherwise.5

Out of the conservative ideological categories of traditionalism, libertarian-ism, and anticommunism, two broad branches of organized conservatism wereconceived in the decade after World War II, and they challenged each other forcontrol of what would eventually be a political and social movement. Mainstreamor electoral conservatism relied on the Republican party as its vehicle in the two-party system and depended on time-tested methods for assessing, developing,

INTRODUCTION 5

and entrenching power. The GOP served as a top-down conduit of information,regulations, and strategies. Lifting postwar conservative ideology directly fromits creators, these activists initially altered it only slightly to appeal to voters.

Extremist conservatives, however, borrowed more heavily and energeticallyfrom anticommunism. Hoping to end (or at least circumvent) the “easternEstablishment’s” dominance of the Republican party, extremists sought to widenparticipation in the electoral process. The Republicans in power, they knew,would not be converted easily, since the upshot effectively meant dislodging thepower structures that had for so long determined who could and could not guideAmerica.6

Not all extremists were conspiracy theorists, and not all electoral conserva-tives believed in the power of the GOP. But each camp understood the impor-tance of guiding conservatism in its battle against the ideology and practitionersof the New Deal Coalition. Franklin Roosevelt, through the accidents and op-portunities created by the Great Depression, helped to create one of the mostpowerful and seemingly impregnable voting blocs in American history.7 ThoughDwight Eisenhower had broken the two-decade–long Democratic lock on theWhite House, neither electoral nor extremist conservatives thought him con-servative. Unable to challenge the New Deal Coalition, Eisenhower perpetu-ated the welfare state.8 Conservatives of both persuasions needed an alterna-tive, although few existed prior to the early 1960s. Robert A. Taft had all theright credentials, although he had limited appeal to the middle of the party, butthen he died young. Joseph McCarthy was too embroiled in controversy to meanmore than he was—a lightning rod and symbol for the increasing frustrations ofmany conservatives across the country. Richard Nixon was almost the opposite:more politician than man, a chameleon eager to please. Not until Barry Gold-water would the two branches of the movement agree on a candidate. But thenextremism reared its ugly head and forced the “responsible” or electoral con-servatives to wonder what they had wrought. Still, Goldwater helped fuse thetwo movements into one, and his symbolic power enlivened the grassroots aswell as the party proper. In effect, January 1965 marked two inaugurals: one forLyndon Johnson’s first full term as president and the other for the conservativemovement, recently defeated but pulsing with vitality.

Political movements are not easily defined. At a minimum they must possessa group consciousness, with members identifying with each other and with com-mon political aims.9 Typically, members categorize themselves in a specific so-cial stratum, preferring their own group and disdaining outsiders. Dissatisfac-tion with the group’s status, power, or material resources is frequently blamedon either specific individuals or the inequities of the social or political system.10

Taken together these components signify the birth of a movement, or that mo-ment when participants refuse to continue accepting their lot and begin work-ing together to correct perceived wrongs. Given the relatively weak political

6 INTRODUCTION

position of conservatives between 1932 and 1960, it is not surprising that manyself-professed conservatives in the late 1950s and 1960s acquired some or all ofthese belief components.

Political movements, however, are continually evolving. Democratically basedmovements, or movement cultures, often pass through four stages. First an in-dependent institution is created in the form of a political party, organization, orother group to provide a context for new, oppositional interpretations. Nextmembers formulate a tactical approach to recruit adherents. The institution thengenerates new explanations, which previously had held no legitimate place insociety. Finally the group’s ideas, now solidly in place, are made public with theaim of expanding the movement beyond its initial constituents.11 The self-respectand confidence gained by members of a political movement—the ability to be-lieve in themselves and their cause—is crucial, since they realize that their worldcan, in fact, change. Of course such a concept might be seen as inherently contra-dictory in describing conservatives. But when considering the political circum-stances in America since the mid-1930s, conservatives could imagine themselvesto be as beleaguered as any ideological minority in the twentieth century.

The conservative movement attained each stage of the sequence, and its par-ticipants gained confidence in their ability to alter the American landscape. Theconservative movement, however, was also different from other democraticmovements in that it relied on elites to provide an intellectual backbone and anorganizational structure. Yet despite its top-down framework, the movement wassupple enough so that the rank and file could enter and influence the natureand direction of the undertaking. Moreover the groundswell relied as much onimpulse as official membership in any sanctioned organization. In other wordssince people believed they belonged to a movement, they did, thus adding to itspolitical and social power. Much like a self-fulfilling prophecy, this increasedmomentum not only convinced activists they were succeeding but also helpeddraw in hesitant participants.

This book argues that in the 1950s conservatives initially created two distinctbut overlapping movement cultures.12 One advocated the development of partyand electoral solutions to the problem of liberalism, while the other looked toprivate organizations to initiate the changes its members thought necessary toreform America. The latter, furthermore, relied heavily on the work of extrem-ists, who believed it imperative to use not only electoral politics but also meth-ods that invited confrontation with the “enemy.” This split in conservatism deep-ened in the early 1960s and reached its nadir in 1964 at the Republican NationalConvention, when Barry Goldwater threw down the gauntlet and challengedmoderate Republicans to confront his wing of the party.

The division gave rise to two sets of strategies, tactics, and personalities. Stillthe divide was permeable, with cross-fertilization giving rise to new strategic andtactical strains. More important, in the wake of Goldwater’s defeat, the Repub-

INTRODUCTION 7

lican party reaped an unexpected dividend—the perception of ideological ob-jectivity. As extremism was pushed out of the conservative equation, moderateRepublicans who had backed Lyndon Johnson began to reassess their old party.Since extremism had been so intimately connected with conservatism, the ab-sence of extremism meant that conservatism gained newfound legitimacy. Inother words the lack of extremist influences signified that the GOP’s stances werenot tainted, so their policies were not only more “purely” conservative, they werealso perceived as more balanced, responsible, and acceptable to larger numbersof voters.

Although the Republicans lost the election in 1964 in large part due to ex-tremism, they learned to deal with the fringe elements that threatened their partyfar earlier and more effectively than did the Democrats. Republicans mar-ginalized extremists in favor of the solid middle of the party, while simultaneouslycalculating how to retain extremists’ loyalty. In this way the GOP learned howto act like a broker state or the informal regulatory system adopted duringFranklin Roosevelt’s administrations when competing interests fought for atten-tion, favor, and the chance to influence the federal government. The GOP forcedextremists to take their place alongside other conservative interest groups, whichwere also fighting for resources and supporters in their attempts to influencethe party. Unable to continue circumventing the process obeyed by all otherconservative bands, extremists found themselves unable to slip the noose—tiedand adjusted by their conservative comrades—which slowly began to tighten.The best option left to the extremists, then, was acting like the other organiza-tions that had contributed to the ideological solidification of the single move-ment. Extremists hoped that they would retain a proportional share of the in-fluence (for example, if there were ten adjunct groups, extremists would wieldone-tenth of the power), although party leaders felt differently.

The factionalism and internecine warfare among conservatives gave littleindication that a robust and relatively united movement would emerge by theend of the 1960s. The individuals who shaped the contours of the rise of con-servatism were a mixed lot; some were well known, while others labored in ob-scurity. How these people and the events they created and to which they re-acted shaped the emergence of a vital conservative political force is the story ofthis book.

The history of this transformation has only been told in decidedly limited waysand has relied heavily on electoral politics and the most public of actors. Suchapproaches do a disservice not only to the events, ideas, and individuals of thetime but also to the determination of the consequences of the era. The peren-nial underdog in national politics, prior to 1960 American conservatism had beenan ideology accorded little respect by intellectuals. By 1968 everything was dif-ferent. No longer did liberals set the agenda and force conservatives to react.Conservative ideology fused with political action and created opportunities for

8 INTRODUCTION

dissatisfied Americans to express their disgust. Although conservative ideologywas not created during the 1960s, its political components were, and the con-servatism of the 1970s, 1980s, and 1990s is its direct descendant. To understandthis period in the American political arena, it is crucial that the processes thatcreated the progenitor and its offspring be unraveled.

As conservative theorist Richard Weaver notes, “ideas have consequences,”a bon mot that rings especially true when charting the course of the modernAmerican conservative movement. In the first decade after World War II, suchintellectuals as Russell Kirk, Friedrich A. Hayek, William F. Buckley, Jr., andWhittaker Chambers weighed in with important works that outlined the threepowerful strands of conservatism: traditionalism, libertarianism, and anticom-munism. These general categories remained flexible, and their lack of defini-tion permitted widespread contradictions. By the early 1950s the three strands,anchored by anticommunism, began to be absorbed by a self-selected popula-tion. A number of speakers and writers on lecture circuits started contactingAmericans who already held conservative beliefs and began to convey what the“new” conservatism looked like. In perhaps the boldest challenge during the firsthalf of the 1950s, foreign-policy specialist James Burnham attacked the theoryof containment and proposed a more aggressive strategy to win the Cold War,which set off debates in the Pentagon and raised questions about national secu-rity. As the second half of the decade began, conservative ideology, while stilllimited in its exposure to the general population, had made a strong showingaround the country.

In the second half of the decade a series of events helped catalyze the con-servative enterprise in America. Three Supreme Court decisions handed downon the same day in 1957 elicited howls of protest about the dangers of commu-nist infiltration in the United States. Soviet Premier Nikita Khrushchev’s visit in1959 prompted some Americans to wonder if Eisenhower was simply capitulat-ing to the enemy. FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover’s book Masters of Deceit de-tailed a communist plot to overthrow the country from within. As part of Eisen-hower’s attempt to thaw relations between the two superpowers, the UnitedStates displayed art in the American National Exhibition in Moscow in 1959.When the House Un-American Activities Committee (HUAC) suspected thatsome of the artists had communist ties, the show became a conservative causecélèbre. Finally as HUAC continued its investigations into education, entertain-ment, and other areas of American life, in 1960 liberals challenged the com-mittee’s very existence. After HUAC hearings in San Francisco disintegratedinto a melee, conservatives in Congress and elsewhere produced a film thatdefended the committee, which renewed concerns over whether the country,now led by John F. Kennedy, would end up in the hands of the enemy. As the1950s ended, conservatives saw the need for political solutions to social andcultural problems. Some thought that independent organizations would offer

INTRODUCTION 9

the best answers, while others believed that the two-party system had to be hi-jacked and the GOP used to engineer a political revolution. Activists, however,tapped the reserves of conservative discontent first and gave birth to a numberof independent factions.

To create groups populated by non-intellectuals, conservative ideology hadto move from unproved theory to social and political action, where averageAmericans could be exposed to and understand what conservatism meant. Re-cently inspired Americans searched for places to manifest their newfound ex-citement. Filling the vacuum in the early 1960s were a number of extremistorganizations, heretofore ignored or belittled by most chroniclers of the era. Ledby Robert H. W. Welch, Jr.’s John Birch Society (JBS), far rightists turned toconspiracy theories to explain how the nation was aiding its own demise. Welchcreated a national organization to sell his particular brand of conservatism andin the process attracted almost 100,000 members and the attention of theKennedy administration and the Republican party. Typically dismissed as a col-lection of “kooks,” the JBS performed much like a third party: it forced the GOP,the Democrats, and conservatives of all types to respond to its agenda. More-over the complex organizational hierarchy helped create a new kind of conser-vative activism. In neighborhoods and towns scattered across the country, smallgroups of Americans comprised the beginnings of what became a national pro-test movement, challenging the status quo and refusing to compromise. The JBShelped develop a conservative movement culture, or those components criticalto a political movement or campaign that might not be expressly political. Ral-lies, letter drives, social events, and a variety of local projects all helped Birchershone their skills, spread the word of conservatism, and become more deeplyinvested in American politics. For some members the society was an end untoitself, while for others it was a starting point, an introduction that led to muchmore.

As the number of Americans who turned to organizations such as the JBSswelled, episodes like the 1961 case of General Edwin A. Walker justified fearsof anticommunism and conservatism gone amok. After being relieved of his armycommand in West Germany for indoctrinating his troops with anticommunistliterature, Walker became an instant conservative symbol. Taking a stand on hisactions could be interpreted as supporting the radical Right or acquiescing tothe liberal establishment. Trying to rally around the general without alienatingmore moderate or liberal Republicans, conservatives appeared to support Walkerwholeheartedly. In fact public solidarity masked private discontent among con-servatives and camouflaged divisions within the movement. Moreover the Re-publican party’s reluctance to criticize Walker or to purge extremists came backto haunt it three years later when leaders refused to oust extremists in the beliefthat the “big tent” could stand the strain. A window onto the conservative move-ment just before Barry Goldwater took the country by storm, the Walker inci-

10 INTRODUCTION

dent illustrated the Right’s essential dilemma: should conservatives of all stripesstick together, or should extremists who could alienate the center of the GOPbe purged in order to win political power?

As action took precedence over ideology, a grassroots constituency emerged,which backed local and national candidates, created new circles in which tosocialize, and developed a cultural component necessary to sustain the politicalapparatus. At the same time, however, extremists forced the responsible Rightto react. Non-extremists faced a press and federal government made hostile bytheir brethren, but they also understood that to kowtow to the liberals meant, ineffect, joining them. Events based on both liberal and conservative circumstanceshelped solidify conservatism’s grip on a growing number of Americans, and inlate 1961 a small number of political operatives realized that their chance tocapture the GOP and perhaps the White House had arrived.

A full three years before the 1964 election, a group of well-placed conserva-tive Republicans decided that they would nominate a “true” conservative and ifthat meant sacrificing the election in order to gain the party, so be it. BarryGoldwater, a senator from Arizona with rock-solid libertarian, anticommunist,and traditionalist credentials, became the rallying point for the nascent conser-vative movement. Grassroots efforts, including a number of extremist factions,sprang up to support the senator. Deciding that the party should suffer the kooks,Republican leaders decided not to purge those supporters on the far Right andhoped that the moderates and liberals would tolerate the newcomers in orderto gain the White House. A combination of a badly run campaign, too much faithin ideology as a political product, and a candidate who eschewed pressing theflesh created a referendum on Goldwater, which helped Lyndon Johnson winan apparent mandate and truly inaugurated the Great Society.

Conservatives, however, did achieve a number of crucial goals with this cam-paign. They seized the party and legitimized the movement. Thousands ofAmericans were introduced to campaigning and politics, a commitment manysustained after 1964, and a vibrant political culture emerged. Conservatives pio-neered new fundraising techniques, which solicited small contributions frommillions of Americans, mirroring the shift from a GOP dominated by easternersto one that was beginning to penetrate the South and the Sunbelt. The Gold-waterites lost, but lessons were learned from the experience. Moderates and lib-erals could not be ignored were the party to form a powerful enough coalition towin. Something would have to be done about the radical Right. Ideology couldonly take a campaign so far. In short while the GOP had been pried open to in-clude millions of new conservatives, it still needed charismatic salespeople tospread the gospel. Drafting Barry Goldwater was not, as it turned out, a conser-vative panacea. It did, however, expose problems the movement had to confront,namely what to do with extremists; how to recruit, coordinate, and satisfy volun-teers; and how to sell an ideology to enough Americans to win a national contest.

INTRODUCTION 11

It did not take long for conservatives to regroup from their devastating loss.Nationally publicized elections in New York City and California taught them howto manage campaigns that would attract moderate and liberal Republicans orconservative Democrats, without ostracizing the hardcore of the movement. Soona test case presented itself to the conservative wing of the GOP: WilliamF. Buckley, Jr.’s candidacy for the mayor of New York City in 1965. Conceivedas a defensive maneuver to prevent liberal Republican John V. Lindsay fromdefiling the GOP, Buckley ran as much to test other Republicans as to apply thelessons of 1964. Like Goldwater, Buckley knew he had little chance of winning.Yet he never wavered from his stringent conservative stances, bringing a num-ber of issues, such as race, education, employment, and the role of the govern-ment, to light for millions. Buckley was also the first conservative to take a solidstand against extremist support, which created a template other candidates woulduse in the future. Hoping to prove the vitality of conservative Republicanism,Buckley ran one of the most fascinating campaigns of the 1960s. Moreover heconfirmed what 1964 had shown: that conservatives still had work to do, thatthe big tent was not yet erected, and that ideology had its political limits. But healso told Americans, millions of whom followed the campaign, that conserva-tism was not an overnight political tactic but a philosophy, which had developedover years and was unlikely to disappear because of one or two defeats. Theconservative revival had begun.

The Goldwater debacle had served to open the party up to political novices,particularly in the South and West, allowing newly-made activist Americans toplay a part in the democratic process. It was in California, with Ronald Reagan’s1966 gubernatorial campaign, that the tide turned for electoral conservatism inthe post-Goldwater era. Here party and movement first merged smoothly; ex-tremism was dealt with effectively (so effectively, in fact, that responsible con-servatives accelerated its rapid demise); and factionalism was overcome. Reagan’scandidacy was not without its difficulties: his acting career, lack of governmentservice, connection to various extremists, and a seemingly superficial understand-ing of the issues could have left the California GOP hamstrung. Instead Reaganand his handlers mounted a brilliant campaign, defeating incumbent EdmundG. “Pat” Brown and confirming the state as a leader of political trends. Reagan’s“Eleventh Commandment,” which forbade one Republican to speak ill of an-other, papered over private and public differences. Moreover Reagan’s agendashored up those factions that suddenly found themselves co-opted by a rein-vigorated party and helped them carry conservatism into the next decade. WithReagan’s landslide victory, conservatism was reborn stronger than in 1964 anddetermined to emerge victorious before the end of the decade, a goal achieveda mere two years later.

By the late 1960s conservatives, still in control of the GOP, had managed toconsolidate their efforts behind Richard Nixon, a man few conservatives fully

12 INTRODUCTION

trusted, although most realized he was their best hope to capture the WhiteHouse. A number of citizen groups—vestiges of the Goldwater campaign—maintained the momentum from one decade to the next and solidified the bondbetween party and movement. Four of these splinter groups in particularhelped to carry the conservative agenda into the next decade. Americans forConstitutional Action, the Free Society Association, the American ConservativeUnion, and Young Americans for Freedom all worked to refine an ideologicaland programmatic agenda, raise money for candidates, and mount issue-basedcampaigns. Far more sophisticated than their forebears from the Goldwater cam-paign, these groups also provided an outlet for dispossessed extremists. Fac-ing internal and external hostility, the John Birch Society and other far-rightorganizations shrank. The four main splinters, however, redirected some ofthat extremist energy into more constructive applications and, in the case ofYoung Americans for Freedom, even trained a new generation of conserva-tive activists.

By 1980 the revolution was complete. With a true conservative as the party’snominee, conservative Republicans and Democrats threw their support behindRonald Reagan without hesitation. Whether or not they knew that his policieshad their roots in 1940s and 1950s ideology, they understood that they liked theman as much or more than what he represented.

Innumerable social and political movements were born—and died—in the1960s. How many of those achieved their goals or even survived past infancy isdebatable. It is only recently that some of the light shone upon the decade isstriking actors on the Right. And yet, perhaps more than any other postwarpolitical crusade, modern American conservatism, which experienced its forma-tive years during the sixties, represents a successful pursuit of an ideological andprogrammatic agenda. Though the ideology proved to have its limitations, theenterprise never ventured far from belief systems rooted in a response to post-war society. Traditionalism, libertarianism, and anticommunism all offered some-thing for those inclined to believe that the country needed to change, that theprograms wrought by the New Deal hurt rather than helped. With a movementculture and a political culture supporting electoral efforts, such endeavors helpedto attract millions of formerly politically apathetic Americans.

But if a conservative birth was inevitable, its growth into maturity and even-tual triumph were not. Liberal failures alone did not ensure conservative suc-cess; conservatives themselves did and only after many failures of their own.Hazily defined and with too few activists in the 1950s, conservatism, which wasnever fully united, nonetheless split; its two main factions developed their ownagendas, heroes, and villains. Joined behind Barry Goldwater, electoral andextremist conservatives tolerated each other as they hoped that the senator fromArizona would be the balm to heal their wounds. The party succumbed, but notthe White House. In the election’s aftermath the division between extremist and

INTRODUCTION 13

electoral conservatives helped chart the movement’s direction, often forcing itto tack an indirect path to its final destination. Reevaluating what it would taketo win the White House, mainstream conservatives realized that only with acleansed party did they stand a chance. At the 1960 Republican National Con-vention, Goldwater had told his fellow conservatives to “grow up.”13 This is thestory of how the movement did just that.

14 A TIME FOR CHOOSING

1

THE BIRTH OF

POSTWAR CONSERVATISM

In 1950 the literary and cultural critic Lionel Trilling said out loud what manyAmerican intellectuals silently believed about their country’s political and so-cial heritage: liberalism prevailed so completely that conservatism might be seenforever as illegitimate. “In the United States at this time liberalism is not onlythe dominant but even the sole intellectual tradition. For it is the plain fact thatnowadays there are no conservative or reactionary ideas in general circulation.”1

After guiding America through almost two decades of difficult times, liberal lead-ership had proved, Trilling believed, that not only was the country better offpolitically but that society—particularly the culture—had progressed, whichdemonstrated the superiority of such a system. Moreover whatever conserva-tive notions did exist were not worthy of discussion. They were “impulses” ratherthan “ideas”: “the conservative impulse and the reactionary impulse do not, withsome isolated and ecclesiastical exceptions, express themselves in ideas but onlyin actions or in irritable mental gestures which seem to resemble ideas.”

During the first half of the 1950s a host of observers, including historians LouisHartz and Richard Hofstadter; sociologists Daniel Bell, Seymour Martin Lipset,Nathan Glazer, and David Riesman; and popular commentators writing in suchjournals as the Nation, the New Republic, and the Atlantic, seconded Trilling’sopinion. Even with Senator Joseph McCarthy’s notorious Wheeling, West Virginia,speech on February 8, 1950, which opened an era that outlived its namesake,conservatism appeared destined to remain little more than a whining voice in thewilderness. McCarthyism seemed merely to add to liberal critiques of conserva-tism; the witch hunters were conservatives in their death throes, blindly lashingout in feeble attempts to hold onto some semblance of power. Moreover eventhough such respectable conservatives as Senator Robert A. Taft had stridentlyopposed communism before McCarthy’s mudslinging began, the association withthe junior senator from Wisconsin made the job of anticommunist liberals eveneasier.2 All that remained, said Trilling and the others, were the last rites.

In 1955 a volume edited by Daniel Bell neatly summed up how many aca-demics felt about the vestigial residues of postwar conservatism. In The NewAmerican Right, Bell and his colleagues assembled what they believed was a

THE BIRTH OF POSTWAR CONSERVATISM 15

careful and multidisciplinary critique of what Trilling had called conservative“impulses.” Not so immediately dismissive as Trilling, the authors acknowledgedthat some Americans believed in conservatism and took issue with the ideology’score beliefs. In perhaps the most famous essay of the seven, historian RichardHofstadter examined the growing discontent with liberalism and the legacies ofthe New Deal and pronounced the reaction “pseudo-conservatism.”3 Besidesdelivering the ultimate insult to such conservative theorists as Russell Kirk andWilliam F. Buckley, Jr., Hofstadter sought to fortify what Trilling and others felt:that pseudoconservatives perceived themselves as victims of a changing world.4

Hofstadter acknowledged that there was good reason to fear international com-munism. Both Republicans and Democrats, in fact, denounced the AmericanCommunist party.5 But why, he asked, would some Americans blame their owngovernment for the growth of communism? The answer lay in “the rootlessnessand heterogeneity of American life, and above all, . . . its peculiar scramblefor status and its peculiar search for secure identity.”6 In times of prosperity,Hofstadter said, “status politics” dominated the public’s attitudes toward poli-tics. Discontent was voiced more often in “vindictiveness, in sour memories, inthe search for scapegoats, than in realistic proposals for positive action.”7 Twogroups were most susceptible to experiencing status anxiety: the old YankeeProtestant Americans, who felt crowded by the nouveau riche, and the recentimmigrants, who had something to prove about their loyalty to their newlyadopted country. To relieve their anxiety, these groups practiced a kind of “hyper-patriotism” and “hyperconformity,” values that Hofstadter also saw in prejudicedAmericans. Focusing their hatred on the Dean Achesons, Alger Hisses, andFranklin Roosevelts of the country, the pseudoconservatives attempted to boosttheir status and ensure order between classes, which they hoped would guaran-tee their own place in the nation’s hierarchy.

According to Hofstadter pseudoconservatism had not appeared until the1950s for four reasons. First the disappearance of the “automatic built-in statuselevator” meant that one’s child might not be the next Horatio Alger. In theuncertainty of the postwar world, the expectation that a child would surpass hisor her parents in level of education, type of employment, and material comfortwas disappearing rapidly. (It is unclear, however, how Hofstadter reached theconclusion that social mobility was decreasing during an era of nearly unparal-leled economic growth.) Second mass communication enabled average Ameri-cans to participate in politics in ways previously unthinkable, injecting their “pri-vate emotions and personal problems” into the mix. Third the long reign ofliberalism gave rise to the increased frustration of those who felt disenfranchisedby increased government activism and promoted more open combat betweenbusinessmen and supporters of the New Deal. Finally pseudoconservatives werefrustrated by the continued but confusing war footing on which the country had


remained after World War II. Instead of returning to a time when individualscould focus on themselves and their families, Americans were forced—by theirown government, many thought—to remain prepared for an unknown future.Although Hofstadter trusted that pseudoconservatism would not spread, Belland the others feared that conservatives and pseudoconservatives were in des-perate straits, and desperate people do desperate things.

To a degree the liberals—both academic and otherwise—were correct. Con-servatives had not climbed out of the hole they had dug during the New Dealand in their isolationism prior to World War II. After fifteen years of govern-ment intervention in the economy, business was booming, and the United Stateswas the world leader in manufacturing and consumption. After Roosevelt’s char-ismatic leadership and Harry Truman’s surprisingly inspired guidance, America,while not preventing Eastern Europe or China from falling into communisthands, had set the tone in world diplomacy. Most important, after a decade ofeconomic uncertainty and the costliest foreign war in American history, mostcitizens were ready to return to predictable, stable lives in which governmenthelped them when they needed it but otherwise remained invisible. Yet even inthe wild success of the American war experience and its aftermath, there wererumblings of discontent that, shielded by their hubris, liberals either failed to hearor to take seriously. Moreover liberals’ willingness to dismiss conservatism as apsychological phenomenon instead of recognizing it as a young but legitimatepolitical and social ideology did the Left a disservice in the decades to come. Theyfailed to anticipate the drastic changes that were to take place in the coming years.

Two years after Trilling’s eulogy for what he claimed was a stillborn politicalphilosophy, one of the men responsible for helping inspire a new liberal gen-eration during the New Deal spoke to a group of Republican precinct workersin Cleveland. Raymond Moley, a professor at Columbia and one of the braintrusters brought to Washington by FDR to combat the depression, had had achange of faith and had become a Republican. By the late 1940s he had a repu-tation as an astute political and social analyst, penned a column for Newsweek,and frequently spoke to conservatives across the country. Trying to rally thetroops for the 1952 election, Moley hammered home the idea that Republicanshad lost since 1932 for one simple reason: they were outnumbered. In 1948,said Moley, 42 million eligible voters failed to go to the polls. These were thepeople who could help swing the country from the Left to the Right. He namedthe people for whom precinct workers should keep an eye out:

They are the people who have some property, who have some savings oftheir own, insurance policies, government bonds, and bank accounts. Theyare the people who are struggling to get on in the world, to educate theirchildren and to live decent, respectable lives.8


Although Moley’s Americans sounded suspiciously similar to the cast of a FrankCapra movie, he urged his audience not to view these people as a class or groupbut instead as a limitless constituency that, as the years passed, would welcomenew members with each liberal misstep and new communist advance.

Over the next two decades the people Moley described—the targets of thoseRepublican canvassers—would be responsible for creating and staffing the con-servative movement in America. Yet prior to 1955 most conservative intellec-tuals concerned themselves with defining different types of conservatism and,if possible, offering prescriptions for changing the country to conform moreclosely to their visions. As one historian of the intellectual movement describedit, “There is probably no better proof of the isolation of the conservative intel-lectual movement from American politics in the 1950s than its estrangementfrom the immensely popular President Eisenhower.”9 Operating in a vacuumthat effectively shut out popular opinion, conservative intellectuals debatedissues that Moley’s audience (and its target constituents) considered esoteric.Yet they did transmit the issues to the populace, albeit slowly at first. Thechallenge to the liberal status quo, which came from both the intellectuals andthe novice activists, help set the stage for a conservative revolution during thenext two decades.

Between 1948 and 1955 conservatives formulated working definitions of theirbelief system, while simultaneously the nascent ideology invited participationby Americans searching for ways to halt what they perceived as increasinglydangerous trends: an overly strong central government, restricted individualrights, and a weakened presence abroad. While little progress was made thatresulted in conservatives being elected or organizations being formed, duringthese seven years they confronted necessary dilemmas, including defining a com-mon language, figuring out how to ford the ideological moats that isolated con-servative camps, and deciding how to take the first tentative steps toward be-coming an activist movement. The tenets intellectuals provided helped adherentsidentify each other more readily whereas before, when asked how to identify afellow conservative, practitioners were often left wondering exactly what madea person “belong.”10 Yet even with tangible gains in a variety of arenas, includ-ing the Republican capture of the White House, conservatives in 1955 remainedamateurs compared to liberals. For activists to emerge, rally, and recruit, theywould need a coherent belief system around which to organize. Intent on for-mulating an assertive rather than reactionary ideology, conservative theoristssearched for ways to integrate philosophical truisms with politically viable axi-oms. Intellectuals and practitioners who set their minds to the task, however,faced a formidable challenge. It would not be until the appearance of a handfulof thinkers and provocateurs in the 1950s that conservatism began to take a dis-cernible shape.


Russell Kirk and Postwar ConservatismConservatism after the war eventually meant something completely differentthan it had before 1945. Not the least difference was its lack of organization.Before and shortly after the war, such individuals as John T. Flynn and AlbertJay Nock wrote volumes of eloquent attacks on the government and its growingpower, and politicians like Gerald Nye, Robert Taft, and John Bricker had sub-stantial followings. But these individuals remained lone operators, and they rarelyattempted to cross boundaries or form coalitions. What was missing was a de-finable ideology or, as one writer explained it, “the descriptive vocabulary of day-to-day existence, through which people make rough sense of the social realitythat they live and create from day to day.”11 Perhaps some of the aforementionedindividuals could have described the vocabulary that they themselves used. Butbeyond this small coterie, most Americans were not familiar with a conservativelingua franca, and in the mid-1950s few Americans were investing themselvesin determining what constituted conservatism.

One of the reasons that conservatism gained traction only hesitantly at firstwas the postwar variant’s lack of a single definition. Conservatism is based on aset of core beliefs, most frequently identified with the writings of Edmund Burke.Here, human nature is “unchanging and unalterable,” and there is “an objectivemoral order, independent of man’s knowledge or perception of it.”12 These coreideas often manifest themselves in everyday life in a number of ways. For ex-ample, although freedom is an inalienable right, the same forces that demandone’s freedom also require that authority be exercised to regulate society so thatan individual can, in fact, be free. Moreover since humans are essentially un-changing, the government—or any institution—oversteps its bounds by attempt-ing such social engineering as welfare. Thus tradition—whether of limitedgovernment, responsibility for one’s self and one’s community, or a strong de-fense—is essential for a civil society. And yet, since humans are fallible, thesetraditions must be subject to change. One of the best attempts at distilling thesecore ideas into a single definition came in 1962 from M. Stanton Evans, whowrote, “The conservative believes ours is a God-centered, and therefore an or-dered, universe; that man’s purpose is to shape his life to the patterns of orderproceeding from the Divine center of life; and that, in seeking this objective,man is hampered by a fallible intellect and vagrant will.”13 Still, since such anexplication allows for a wide range of interpretation in practical terms, a greatdeal of ideological diversity (within limits) has appeared in the conservativecommunity.

Conservatism’s lack of a single definition was in part responsible for the ram-pant factionalism that brought it to its political nadir in the first half of the 1960s.At the same time that flexibility also allowed political operatives to capitalize ona growing constituency that, if handled correctly, could provide enormous elec-


toral dividends. Most immediately, however, the failure to agree on a single,universal definition resulted in the advent of several distinct though sometimesconverging streams of conservatism.

Three main groups of conservatives eventually appeared from the intersec-tion of postwar events and ideas: traditionalists, libertarians, and anticommu-nists. Traditionalism and libertarianism focused on preventing the state frommeddling in an individual’s affairs, while simultaneously they promoted a beliefsystem that adhered to a universal moral code. American anticommunism, sanc-tioned by the federal government, emerged as a belief system at the end of WorldWar II and the beginning of the Cold War. Adopted by conservatives as a bul-wark against America’s newest enemy, anticommunism also bridged conserva-tism of the prewar and postwar eras. Since communism represented the antith-esis of Burkean conservatism, anticommunism served not only to defend Americaand the West against its encroachment but also to promote conservative valuesat home. Although in the first few years after the war political leaders often fo-cused only on containing communism abroad, conservative theorists quicklyfound anticommunism could help them promote traditionalism and libertari-anism at home. American postwar conservatism, then, adapted prewar ideas topeculiar domestic circumstances and created a new ideology that neverthelesscontained readily identifiable roots. This did not mean, however, that such foun-dations translated easily to the world of practical politics.

Beginning in the early 1950s and lasting for about a decade conservative in-tellectuals debated, often raucously, the interwoven problems of defining whatmade a person conservative and, if such a definition could be created, how thegeneral population could eventually assimilate those beliefs, thus generating anideology. Of the major conservative intellectuals in the immediate postwar era,Russell Kirk weighed in most dramatically as he defined the parameters of thedebate and forever placed the conservative movement in a more easily recog-nizable context.14 Born in 1918 in Michigan, Kirk left his working-class back-ground behind (his father was a railroad engineer) in favor of studying the theo-ries of Edmund Burke and others.15 After a stint in the army during the war,Kirk received a doctorate at St. Andrews University in Scotland, where he honedhis ideas about civilization and the roles of the individual and government insociety. An open admirer of agrarianism, elites, and nonprogressive methods ofeducation, Kirk swam against the tide of political philosophy in the late 1940sand early 1950s. In 1953 he published his groundbreaking work, The Conserva-tive Mind, soon cited by all major American conservative thinkers as one of themost influential books in their lives.

In The Conservative Mind, Kirk outlined six truisms that guided conserva-tive philosophy. The first, that a “divine intent rules society as well as conscience”and that “political problems, at bottom, are religious and moral problems,” ex-plained what would repeatedly confuse many liberals: although conservatives


believed in the sanctity of the Constitution, total separation of church and statewould always be impossible.16 To acknowledge that God affected politics meantthat politicians should consider “divine intent” when making decisions and thatmorality, while difficult to legislate, was present in legislation nonetheless. Sec-ond Kirk declared that conservatives had an “affection for the proliferating va-riety and mystery of traditional life, as distinguished from the narrowing unifor-mity and equalitarianism and utilitarian aims of most radical systems.” Here Kirkrailed against totalitarianism in any guise and declared that life was not lived bestwhen, as later conservatives would call it, engineered. But although Kirk declaredthat humans should respect the “variety and mystery of traditional life,” conser-vatives in the 1950s and after decided that “traditional” would supersede either“variety” or “mystery” when determining what lifestyles were acceptable. Third,said Kirk, “civilized society requires orders and classes,” and further “society longsfor leadership.” Here Kirk began to get at one of the most vexing dilemmas forconservatives: the apparent contradiction between freedom and order. Howsociety can achieve a balance between the two poles remains a problem for eachnew generation of conservatives. Fourth Kirk reminded readers that “propertyand freedom are inseparably connected, and that economic leveling is not eco-nomic progress.” Borrowing from the Founding Fathers as well as from Englishconservative thinkers, Kirk demonstrated that economic opportunity createdfreedom. But opportunity was very different from equalization, a utopian valuethat realists knew was impossible to attain. Fifth an individual must “put a con-trol upon his will and his appetite”; it was only through “tradition and soundprejudice” that people would control their “anarchic impulses.” This desire torevert to a simple life spoke to the same concerns as Kirk’s third point, wherethe rhythms of the agrarian world had defined honesty, and similar environmentaland internal restraints would ground the twentieth century in timeless values.Finally Kirk noted that conservatives needed to recognize “that change and re-form are not identical.” For example, when liberals tried to level society eco-nomically or politically, they failed to comprehend that such change could neverimprove the whole as they hoped. Rather humans would become more depen-dent on one another, in effect violating the first, second, and fourth tenets ofKirk’s canon, and thus never achieve the independence of thought and action(aided by God and the distrust of too much freedom) that defined the apotheo-sis of a civilized society. Society could never—nor should it ever—be perfect.But following Kirk’s guidelines Americans could perhaps move the country inthat direction.17

Appearing at a time when he could bridge the gap between prewar and post-war conservatism, Kirk laid the foundation for the next generation of conserva-tive intellectuals—and politicians. Kirk did not remain embedded in the beliefsof the prewar old Right but instead chose to shine a new light on Americanpolitical philosophy. Just as the aforementioned events affected millions of


Americans by showing them that the world had changed drastically, Kirk un-derstood that the world was entering a new era, which required a reinvigoratedset of guidelines. Moreover Kirk was also one of the first to show conservativesthat one could remain an intellectual while still acting and thinking construc-tively about practical politics. In the years following the debut of The Conserva-tive Mind, Kirk wrote a syndicated column about American politics, contributeda column called “From the Academy” to National Review, and served as anadviser to a number of politicians.18 Forty years after The Conservative Mind,one historian of the intellectual movement went so far as to say, “Above all, itstimulated the development of a self-conscious conservative intellectual move-ment in the early years of the Cold War. It is not too much to say that withoutthis book we, the conservative intellectual community, would not exist today.”19

Kirk helped provide the intellectual content for conservative popularizers todisseminate, which eventually proved that Americans could understand andadopt ideas formerly considered too esoteric and formal to enter the politicalmainstream.

The Conservative Mind influenced generations of conservatives, sparked awave of interest among intellectuals, and led a number of new works that sameyear. Leo Strauss’s Natural Right and History, Robert Nisbet’s The Quest forCommunity, and Whittaker Chambers’s Witness were all released in 1953, cre-ating an instant required reading list for aspiring or committed conservatives.20

Moreover these works showed conservatives that they could respond to liberalslike Trilling and later Hofstadter. And yet, even with the declaration of canonsby the most pedigreed conservative theorists in the country, most Americansdid not know what conservatism was in 1955. The political philosophy wasessentially new, and for all of Kirk’s and others’ implied permanence of theircanons, in practical terms much of conservatism in the mid-1950s was definedby its opposition to liberalism. Nevertheless, with each argument created tocounter liberal ideas, conservatives moved one step closer to more practical andapplicable definitions of their ideology. Rather than simply accepting, for ex-ample, Kirk’s definition of conservatism and then moving on, conservatives con-tinued to search for methods by which they could apply his and others’ theo-ries. The fact that conservatives refused to accept a single interpretation of theirphilosophy meant that not only was it a dynamic and creative time to be a partof the intellectual and later the political forces, but it also served notice to thoseliberals who bothered to listen, giving them fair warning that here was a powerwith which they would someday have to reckon. Still no network linked the threestrands of conservatism, and this lack of infrastructure appeared most obvi-ous in the disjuncture between those who generated the theory and those whopracticed it.

Unlike liberals, conservative intellectuals and political operatives did not workshoulder-to-shoulder. Among liberals, of course, Roosevelt had pioneered the


brain trust, drawing professors from Harvard and Columbia to Washington wherethey advised him on New Deal policies, which began a Democratic tradition thatlasted for decades. But what intellectuals were publicly identified with, for ex-ample, Robert Taft? There is no single story of how conservative intellectualsand politicians began collaborating, although three discrete steps greatly con-tributed to the process. First the postwar events that signaled such a drasticchange made an impact on intellectuals and politicians alike. Next such men asKirk, Taft, Buckley, and William Rusher learned to traverse between areastraditionally reserved for either theoretical or political writing and action. Fi-nally a small but growing number of individuals who made their living lecturingto and writing for a mass audience began to study and adopt the ideas of conser-vative intellectuals. These popularizers played a key role in disseminating infor-mation to audiences, whose members then helped spread the word even fur-ther. But as the events took place, it was left to Kirk, Buckley, and others to showthat they were cognizant of immediate developments and had something to sayabout them. Conservatism was beginning to descend from the ivory tower.

Conservative Challenge to ContainmentThe decade between 1945 and 1955 was a pastiche of events that, when seen byconservatives, comprised a bleak picture: American influence abroad seemedto crumble before policymakers’ eyes, and at home “un-American” activities andtroubles multiplied with each new controversy. With the end of World War IIand the beginning of the Cold War most Americans hoped to regain stabilityand predictability in their lives. For the previous sixteen years normalcy had beenrare, upstaged by the depression, a new activist government that created a welfarestate, and finally entry into World War II, ending a twenty-year period of un-wavering isolationism. When the less-than-mythical Harry S. Truman replacedFranklin D. Roosevelt in 1945, Americans came to realize that the postwar worldwould not be joined seamlessly to what had come before. Truman’s dealings withthe Soviets at Potsdam and his use of the atomic bomb three weeks later gavereason for optimism: shrugging off prewar isolationism, the United States, finallytaking its proper place in world affairs, would lead the postwar world.

Little, however, seemed to go right. America “lost” China when the commu-nist revolution led by Mao Tse-tung ended with the U.S. decision to curtailmilitary aid to Chiang Kai-shek. Not only had the Democrats failed to live up totheir purported vision of a democratic world, but they had let the planet’s larg-est country fall victim to that vision’s antithesis. Although Truman had issued in1947 his Truman Doctrine, which stated that communism would be opposedon all fronts by using economic and military aid, hot spots still flared and realwars broke out. When North Korea invaded South Korea on June 24, 1950, the


United States became involved under the aegis of the United Nations, a strat-egy designed to avoid a direct confrontation with the Soviets.

Fears of communism manifested themselves in nearly all parts of society,trickling down to average citizens, who came to expect episodes like the Hisstrial or the Rosenberg case to present themselves on a somewhat regular basis.Politicians, most famously Joseph McCarthy, had exploited these fears, whichled some observers to decry the “irresponsible” conservatives. But even respon-sible conservatives like Robert Taft were, as one friend recalled, “rabid on thesubject of communism. Just the word would make him furious about it.”21 Yetanticommunism was a confused patchwork of opinions, sometimes contradic-tory or formed without an obvious rationale. By 1954 only 5% of Americansbelieved that communists could practice communism and remain loyal Ameri-cans.22 Conversely, less than 1% of those surveyed worried about the internalcommunist threat enough to mention it when describing what kinds of thingsworried them in their day-to-day lives.23 And 87% of Americans felt they hadnever known anyone who was or who they suspected to be a communist.24 StillAmericans did not need to act rationally in order to justify their fears, and al-though most conservatives did not deliberately hope to increase paranoia sur-rounding communism, they took advantage of the anxiety nonetheless.

Perhaps the most important predicament that creators of postwar conserva-tism had to confront was how to reconcile so many different definitions of whatoutsiders thought was a single belief system. In other words, what was “conser-vatism,” and what might it look like in ten years? These questions mattered sincemost scholars—and many political operatives—believed that in the early 1950sconservatism was being created, whereas liberalism simply existed as (liberalsbelieved) a combination of American heritage and the product of decades ofDemocratic rule. This “invention” of conservatism gave conservatives themselvesa chance to figure out what they believed, and it was not long before a range ofideas found their place in the conservative pantheon. One opportunity to de-fine the ideology more explicitly presented itself in 1950, when a relatively littleknown conservative challenged one of the luminaries of liberal foreign policy,George Kennan.

When the Cold War began at the end of World War II the question thatdominated U.S. foreign policy was how to preserve American interests abroadand help free-market democracies expand across the globe while not pushingthe Soviets too far. By 1947 the Truman administration seemed to have its an-swer: containment. First coined by State Department official George F. Kennanin his “long telegram” from Moscow and then in a Foreign Affairs article, “TheSources of Soviet Conduct” (which Kennan signed “X,” giving rise to its morecommon title, “The X Article”), containment was predicated on the belief thatcommunism carried the seeds of its own destruction. If democracies around the


world could prevent its spread and restrict the ideology to those areas alreadypossessed by the Soviets (and later Chinese), soon the red dominion wouldcrumble under its own weight. Kennan became the darling of the liberals; notonly was his analysis perceptive because it elegantly articulated what many StateDepartment and foreign policy analysts had already been thinking, but it wasalso a strategy that did not seem to require America to go to war in order tooppose and eventually defeat communism. Many conservatives, however, be-lieved that waiting was akin to appeasement, a comparison that invariably trig-gered memories of the 1938 Munich Conference, where the British and Frenchacceded to Hitler’s demands, which exposed their weaknesses and ensured theinvasion of Poland.

The burden of the conservative response to containment fell on a youngphilosophy professor at New York University named James Burnham. Like someothers who composed the intellectual Right in the early 1950s, Burnham hadbegun his political career as a member of the far Left during the 1930s. Born in1905 and educated at Princeton and Oxford, Burnham worked with communistunions in Detroit and eventually became a hardcore Trotskyite. Toward the endof the 1930s, however, Burnham became disillusioned with Stalin’s rule in theSoviet Union and simply could not accept Trotsky’s explanation that the auto-cratic leader and the conditions he imposed were an “aberration.”25 The Hitler-Stalin Pact and the Soviet war with Finland both helped assure Burnham thathe had assumed correctly, and his conversion from leftist to rightist continuedfor the rest of the decade. By the late 1940s he was satisfied that the ruthlesscommunists would stop at nothing to achieve their goals, and by the early 1950she was decidedly in the conservative camp.26

In many ways Burnham was like Kirk: a transitional figure between the oldand new Right. Decidedly not a libertarian, Burnham opposed military demo-bilization after the war and believed that conscription was necessary if the countrywere to resist the communists seriously. The government had a crucial role toplay, decided Burnham, and if that meant impinging upon some people’s rightsin order to guarantee safety for the vast majority, then so be it. In his 1947 book,The Struggle for the World, Burnham urged the government to outlaw theAmerican Communist party.27 When Burnham turned his sights on Kennan’spolicy of containment, he continued moving in a direction that signaled increasedreliance on concerted government power and a faith in leaders to make the rightdecisions. Burnham’s refusal to join with the postwar isolationists and his will-ingness to apply the country’s resources energetically meant that his ideasemerged as a viable alternative to Kennan or to what many conservatives thoughtof as an updated sitzkrieg.

The Coming Defeat of Communism spelled out Burnham’s convictions aboutnot only the present world political and military situations but also what neededto be done in the future to guarantee the survival of Western democracy. Now


that the war was over the world was at a crucial juncture: the United States wasthe only power left that could oppose the Soviets and Chinese. Germany, Japan,Great Britain, and France were all vanquished in one respect or another.28 Sincethe war American foreign policy had avoided the absolute worst but had gainednothing for its caution. With the democracies of Europe in such a weakenedstate, could the United States really afford to maintain a defensive posture? Sincecontainment was “a variant of the defensive,” and the “communist war for worldcontrol is not limited by formal declarations, but is continuous,” it was clear thata static strategy like containment could only mean disaster once the commu-nists had started to overwhelm Europe.29 America could not rely on Europe todefend itself; not only was it battered from the war, but in some cases it wasquestionable whether those democracies wanted to survive. A postwar open-ness toward fascism and communism in some countries forced Burnham towonder how waiting for the Soviets to collapse—even as they used subversionto undermine neighboring countries’ governments and attitudes toward democ-racy—would be effective.

As an alternative to containment, Burnham suggested that the first acts ofengagement be “untraditional” insurgency, using Soviet methods to beat themat their own game. Propaganda should be integrated into foreign policy as anessential element. In Soviet spheres like Poland and Czechoslovakia Americashould begin training and supplying guerrillas and recruiting refugees, exiles,and dissidents to spread unrest.30 “Yielding, compromise, conciliation, alwaysand invariably result in increased communist boldness, increased demands, fur-ther aggressions,” wrote Burnham.31 Although the “net trend” between 1946 and1949 favored democracy, it remained to be seen what would happen next. Itwas America’s choice: “Does the United States choose to win? Can it make thenecessary decision? Is it going to have, at the required tension, the will to sur-vive?” Like much of the rest of his book, Burnham concluded on a hopeful note:“The defeat of communism, probable on the facts, is also inevitable, becausethere are enough determined men in the world—and their number grows daily—who have so resolved.”32 The implication, however, was clear: if the governmentdid not change its strategy and instead kept those “determined men” hamstrungby the policy of containment, it would not matter how committed they actuallywere.

Although Burnham did not attempt to construct an ideological bridge betweendivisions of conservatism, the conservative and general community received hiswork favorably. In popular journals Burnham’s book created a stir. The New YorkTimes devoted an interview to Burnham and two book reviews, including thefront page of the Sunday Book Review. Most important, perhaps, was the work’simpact in the intellectual and foreign policy circles in Washington and New York.The Washington Post led off the debate with an editorial entitled “Burnham vs.Kennan.” Outlining Burnham’s argument, the editors praised his “incisive logic.”


Five months later the Post followed up with another editorial, this time detail-ing the split that had developed within the Departments of Defense and Statebetween followers of Burnham and followers of Kennan. Francis P. Matthews,secretary of the navy, was a “Burnhamite,” while Dean Acheson, secretary ofstate, was an avowed “Kennanite.” At a speech in Boston Matthews reiteratedBurnham’s theory of “preventative war” when he stated that the United Statesmust be willing to pay “even the price of instituting a war to compel cooperationfor peace.”33 With the outbreak of war in Korea, said the editors, the Burnhamitesmust have felt that their argument had taken on new gravity. But the war didnot change the editors’ opinions; it only served to strengthen their support forcontainment. Military actions should serve political ends, not the other wayaround, they said. But that was not what Burnham was really saying. He neverclaimed that diplomacy should be secondary to outright action. Rather if diplo-macy failed or the enemy failed to heed warnings then action would have to betaken.

Not long after Burnham’s book was released in February 1950, the NationalSecurity Council drafted Document 68, which laid out the government’s ColdWar aims and the solutions its authors thought would work best. NSC-68 calledfor a dramatic increase in the military budget and the provision of political andeconomic aid to free countries threatened by Soviet expansionism. The inva-sion of South Korea by North Korea seemed to validate the new plans, and soonthe military budget began to skyrocket. By the fall of 1950 observers noticedthat a new tone could be heard in the hallways of the Pentagon and in congres-sional offices. One of the first reports of such a change came in the Wall StreetJournal, where the reporters seemed to have gotten wind of NSC-68 and theimpact of Burnham’s theories on the NSC and other high-level decisionmakers.For many, the article implied, the Korean War had demonstrated that “it’s clearto us the Kremlin won’t hesitate to start a whole series of similar local fights.That could keep us on a war footing for decades. We’ve got to start pushing theiron curtain back, not just holding it steady.”34

What worried policymakers most was the possibility of a protracted strugglethat would cost Americans untold billions. In an unofficial Department ofDefense study entitled “The Inadequacy of Containment,” the authors arguedthat containment relied too heavily on time and money, neither of which was alimitless commodity possessed by the West. The alternative was “aggressive con-tainment,” which, when linked to an arms buildup, would possibly push theSoviets to economic and military crisis sooner rather than later. The MarshallPlan and the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) were both based onKennan’s theory of containment, argued the Journal, and now a new wave ofofficials looked to Burnham’s Coming Defeat of Communism as a potential so-lution to what could be a stalemate. Still Burnham’s theory contained one trou-bling aspect: his idea of preventative war was tough to defend, since no one could


suggest publicly that starting a war in order to prevent one was rational. Never-theless Burnham had achieved his goal; his ideas had made it into the inner sanc-tum of military and political policy circles and finally had given conservatives analternative to the liberalism of Kennan and containment.

Burnham’s influence on the conservative community in the early 1950s isdifficult to overestimate. His confidence in his ideas and his ability to tackle thesymbol of the apotheosis of liberal foreign policy meant that nothing was out ofreach. Senator Robert A. Taft echoed many of Burnham’s ideas in his treatiseon foreign policy published a year later, A Foreign Policy for Americans.35 Wil-liam Rusher, a young conservative who in the mid-1950s was about to embarkon a long career as publisher of National Review, recalled that Burnham’s bookThe Web of Subversion, published four years after The Coming Defeat of Com-munism, had a profound impact on him since it “put the facts of importantCommunist penetration of American life beyond serious doubt, regardless ofone’s opinion of Joseph McCarthy.”36 Throughout the early 1950s Burnhamcontinued to influence policymakers, lecturing at the National War College, theAir War College, the Naval War College, and Johns Hopkins’s School for Ad-vanced International Studies. Burnham might also have worked for the CentralIntelligence Agency; he at least served as a consultant for the agency, and hecontinued to write books and articles for such journals as the American Mer-cury and the Freeman.37 And when Buckley decided to heed the advice of Kirk,Burnham, and others and begin a magazine to, in Burnham’s words, reach “opin-ion-makers all over the country every week,” Burnham was recruited as a senioreditor of National Review with a regular column on foreign affairs, appropri-ately entitled “The Third World War.”38 By 1964, after Barry Goldwater’s riseand electoral fall, Burnham could look back on the previous ten years and real-ize that an “idea in a few hundred heads” in the early 1950s now had millions ofsupporters.39

Two Popularizers: Albert Wedemeyer and Raymond MoleyThe first half of the 1950s was crucial to the formation of conservative attitudestoward the state, liberals, and the communist enemy. Although conservativesdid not create a new activist agenda and formed few significant organizationsdesigned to influence the Republican party, they did start building a system basedon public gatherings built around a combination of intellectual exercises andshared knowledge of the ambient popular culture, creating, in effect, a nascentconservative political culture. Conservatives began stepping up their activities,hoping to bring their message to voters who perhaps had had enough of the NewDeal and Truman. Some wrote for such periodicals as the Freeman, a libertar-ian magazine published by the Foundation for Economic Education (FEE), andHuman Events, originally published by isolationists beginning in 1944. Neither,


however, had large followings outside of a small group of intellectuals, but thosewho read either magazine were likely to be politically active. The constituencythe postwar conservatives needed to reach consisted of those Republicans frus-trated with the party’s weaknesses who also realized that acting independentlywas futile or those Republicans who were minimally involved in the party yetfelt that something was just not right about the country. Conservatives whowanted to change America could not target either postwar isolationists or liber-tarians; not only were both groups on the fringe of mainstream politics, but eachwas minuscule compared to the main body of potential conservatives. The ques-tion remained, then, how to energize dormant activists who could help usher inan era of politics the likes of which had not been seen for at least two decades.

To spread the word traditionalist conservatives turned to a method that hadnot only served them well for the past two centuries at least but also providedthe face-to-face contact often necessary in the early stages of a political or socialmovement: they gave speeches. While talks were often keyed to a recent publi-cation by a notable author or some other promotional gimmick, these conserva-tives took their jobs as town criers seriously. Speakers followed a circuit aroundthe country; stopped in major cities, smaller towns, and college campuses; andaddressed largely sympathetic audiences. The lecturers served to tie togetherpercolating ideas while also reinforcing the notion that the listeners were on theright track. Anticommunism was the common bond among the speakers, cinch-ing together events and theories that otherwise might have seemed disparate.There were exceptions, of course, but these political circuit riders knew theywere on safe ground if they used communism as a common enemy.

In early 1952 Lieutenant General Albert C. Wedemeyer (U.S. Army, ret.)spoke to students of the University of Utah and Brigham Young University onthe 102d anniversary of the creation of the University of Utah by Brigham Young.Wedemeyer, who was now serving as a vice president of a large corporation, hadbecome familiar with virtually every important official in the U.S. governmentduring his long and distinguished military career.40 While Wedemeyer was stillactive in advising the military on matters like Korea, in public he had shifted hisfocus to examining the relationship between individual morality and political andsocial systems and what could be done to correct what he believed was a dan-gerous movement toward adopting ignoble positions vis-à-vis social relations andforeign policy. Not only was the enemy a threat, but so was the state. HereWedemeyer faced the same dilemma conservative intellectuals did: how muchpower should be granted to the state, and how could it best be applied?

“The curse of our time,” declared Wedemeyer, “is Caesarism—the usurpa-tion by the State of the things belonging to the People.”41 Incredibly Wedemeyerlashed out at his own government: “We must make our Government more re-sponsive to the will of the people. We have suffered and sacrificed far too muchunder secret diplomacy and Government bureaucracy. All citizens must partici-


pate fully in all the processes of government, from the precinct to the WhiteHouse and Congress.”42 Much of Wedemeyer’s vitriol, obviously, was aimed atthe Democrats and the Truman administration—a thinly veiled call for Repub-licans to begin administering the country. Still, to hear such open criticism froma man who owed his career to serving a civilian government must have beensurprising.

Wedemeyer’s philosophy was revealing in a number of ways. First and fore-most his perception of the role of the federal government reflected how con-servatives at this time balanced libertarianism and traditionalism in crude yetpragmatic ways. On domestic issues and the role of the military, the governmentwas meant to stay out of the peoples’ way, letting citizens act as the check on“Caesarism.” But in terms of internal security and foreign policy, the govern-ment needed to remain strong and let its enemies know that it would not buckleunder when challenged. The duality of libertarianism, or classical liberalism, andtraditionalism demonstrated an uneasy coexistence with speakers like Wede-meyer trying to define where each belief system should be applied and underwhat circumstances. If anticommunism served as the glue joining the two typesof conservatism, the bond held fast in some places, was tenuous in others, andwas separating in others still. Yet, even though no one had told Wedemeyer todefine conservatism, this speech—and many others like it—advanced the pro-cess a step or two. It would be up to other commentators to refine the relation-ships among traditionalism, anticommunism, and libertarianism, and often thosepundits had, like Whittaker Chambers and Frank Meyer, traversed the range ofpolitical persuasions. Raymond Moley was one of those ideologues.

Following the publication of his book How to Keep Our Liberty, Moley em-barked on a promotional tour, which coincided with the 1952 election.43 As aprofessor of public law at Columbia in 1932, Moley was recruited by FranklinD. Roosevelt first to write campaign speeches and then to head up the braintrust, which set to work trying to solve the depression. In 1933 FDR appointedhim as assistant secretary of state, a position he held for less than one year. Moleycontinued to assist FDR informally until 1936, writing speeches and advisingthe administration. Soon, however, Moley began to question the degree to whichthe government was trying to engineer society by controlling the economy, law,and social relations. The president, Moley realized, had concluded that in orderto win reelection he would have to pander to urban voters and jettison the tra-ditional rural constituency. But Moley must have known that American demo-graphics were shifting; the 1920 census had registered the first urban majorityever, and interest groups such as African Americans and labor were increasinglydemanding recognition and bargaining power. Equally important was the growthof the northern urban ethnic constituency during the 1920s and 1930s, whenthe children of nonvoting immigrants deepened the New Deal Coalition. Stillin 1936 Moley made a decision that changed the rest of his life: “The sudden


shift in Roosevelt’s policies and strategy in the 1935–1936 period meant to methe repudiation of Democratic Party principles of the past. Since I believed insupporting one of the two parties, I accepted the Republican Party as an alter-native.”44 Moley returned to his position at Columbia and also became a colum-nist and contributing editor for Newsweek, a post that gained him a substantialfollowing.

Moley railed against “planning,” or trying to control the economy (and thusother aspects of society) by impinging upon the “natural” relations among busi-nesses, employers, and employees and in the area of supply and demand. Thetemptation to control the economy often led to the “narcotic of authority,” adelusion that Moley thought had captured Roosevelt and Truman and that ledto the dangerous phenomenon of a loss of contrasting opinions within the WhiteHouse. When a leader perceived himself to be without peer when making deci-sions, Moley believed, the propensity for “statism” increased but usually in thebenign garb of welfare programs, controls on trade, and aid to interest groups(particularly unions), all of which guaranteed continued electoral support. Suchcorruption bred moral decay and contempt for authority, causing, obviously, aneed to increase yet again the leader’s control over the people. Moley believedthat only a conservative response could challenge the increasingly powerful lib-eral ideology.

One month after Dwight Eisenhower’s 1952 victory, Moley spoke to theNational Coffee Association convention in Boca Raton, Florida, about “The NewConservatism.”45 Never one to mince words, Moley believed that not only werethe Democrats driving the country into the ground, but that instead of economicdownturns periodically endemic in a capitalist economy, the free-market sys-tem would be replaced by socialism, resulting not in immediate failure but ingradual and possibly permanent decay. Now that the Democrats had beenousted, however, what would help ensure the country’s continued success andvitality? It was here that Moley invoked his “new conservatism.”

According to Moley new conservatism meant “applying the best of the past,”refusing alliances with minority factions, and realizing that it was in the bestinterest of conservatives to consolidate themselves into a single, powerful group.Leaving his audience with a series of observations about how conservatives couldconsolidate their power in the Republican party, Moley recommended that theylook to President Eisenhower for leadership on all issues. Returning to the ques-tion his recent book posed, Moley asked conservatives how they expected toretain their liberty. Democracy entails some degree of risk, Moley reminded hisaudience, since “the very nature of liberty precludes a determination of exactlywhat will happen in the future,” and while individuals may set goals for them-selves, it was folly for a free society to try to achieve success by coercion. “Theprimary concern of conservatism—the old as well as the new conservatism—isto preserve human liberty that may be overlooked in our common use of the


term.” Liberty—as differentiated from freedom—has an intrinsic value sepa-rate from materialistic concerns. Without liberty, Moley advised, life itself hasno value.

Although they could not know it, Moley’s audience had been treated to aforward-looking synopsis of much of conservatism’s direction over the next halfdecade or so. While Moley could not have predicted the events that coincidedwith the changes taking place on the right of the political spectrum (most im-mediately in response to the 1954 Brown v. Board of Education decision), inbroad, sweeping strokes he offered an outline of postwar conservative ideologyin its infancy.46 Like Wedemeyer, Moley had not been asked by anyone to at-tempt to define conservatism, yet he did just that. Both men not only suggestedthe range of popular conservative opinions circa 1952 but also analyzed whichopinions did and did not jibe. The traditionalism the speakers articulated involvedfar more than just preserving the past and questioning the future. Its adaptationof libertarianism meant that even as the government was growing more compli-cated from the responsibilities it had assumed since the beginning of the wel-fare state in the 1930s, some Americans were rebelling against the trend ofadministrative growth that matched economic and demographic growth. TheAmerican experience in World War II had forever changed the country; the waralone cost twice as much as all government spending combined between 1789and 1940. For the first time in its history the United States ran a deliberate defi-cit so that by the end of the war the government owed $258 billion.47 Conserva-tives questioned such Keynesian spending, however, and the Democrats’ will-ingness to continue what seemed like almost assured economic folly furtherstrengthened their resolve to combat liberalism.

Conservatives’ fiscal restraint combined with a growing wariness toward theever-increasing power of the state helped begin the process of integrating tra-ditionalism and libertarianism, in which the individual remained the most im-portant commodity.48 Conservatives would have to prevail against encroachmentsby liberals, who hoped to continue expanding the reach of the government. Andyet such invocations raised practical problems for the conservative community.How were they to oppose liberalism when they were far from united in theirbasic beliefs? Anticommunism could only take them so far before policies notinvolving internal or external security forced leaders to make decisions that wouldexpose their various conservative leanings. The fact remained that in the early1950s conservatism was not a political ideology with a number of equally legiti-mate interpretations, but it did possess a tiny grassroots base of support inde-pendent of that generated by the Republican party. Moreover the very act ofWedemeyer and Moley speaking to audiences symbolized the one-way, top-downnature of decisionmaking within conservative ranks. This is not to say, of course,that there should have been a grassroots conservative element at this time. Thatwould signal a more united movement, something that did not yet exist. For all


intents and purposes conservatism at this time was an exercise reserved for poli-ticians and intellectuals.

Wedemeyer and Moley, however, tested, applied, and revised conservativeideology, and they were surrounded by an array of intellectuals who kept themsupplied with theories that could then be configured to sell to the mainstreampublic. But unlike other eras when intellectuals and activists conspired (eitherdeliberately or by chance) to influence the masses, the circumstances of the ColdWar reshaped both intellectuals’ ideas and activists’ implementation of thoseideas. Sometimes the Cold War acted as a gatekeeper, limiting the public’s expo-sure to certain ideas. At other times the standoff distorted circumstances, chang-ing them to suit the needs of an administration or political party. In any casepostwar conservatives continued to assemble the tools they needed to competepolitically and socially with liberals, and as they gained confidence their dreamsbecame more sweeping while their plans became more pragmatic.

Forced to grapple with such issues as how a conservative would be self-identified, what would define the differences among the various factions, andhow they would create a movement to challenge liberals, conservatives took whathad been older ideas, put them in relatively new packages, and tested them, pre-paring themselves for the struggles ahead. Liberals, on the other hand, did notface the equivalent challenges for another fifteen years. During the Eisenhoweryears they managed to make conservatives feel like illegitimate children, observ-ers who merely commented on the action taking place in the main arena, whichliberals controlled. As challengers, conservatives would need to define the termsof a new debate, something that could demonstrate how different the two ide-ologies really were. When such chances began appearing regularly in the late1950s and early 1960s, conservatives started seeking them out until, by the mid-1960s, they could choose their battles. In the early 1950s, however, opportuni-ties were still rare.

Toward a Definition of ConservatismA decade after the publication of The Coming Defeat of Communism, JamesBurnham took a blank sheet of paper and literally sketched out a contemporarypolitical spectrum, diagramming where the country stood at the brink of a newdecade. In the drawing’s center, or “the Establishment,” was Lyndon Johnson.To his immediate right was Eisenhower, and to his immediate left was AdlaiStevenson. Much farther to the left was John F. Kennedy, then Hubert Humphrey,after which Burnham grouped the socialists, communists, nihilists, and leftistanarchists. On the right, the equivalents were Harry F. Byrd and Barry Gold-water, followed by authoritarianism, fascism, racists, and finally, rightist anar-chists.49 Trying to define conservatism, Burnham then made lists: “conservative(in the full and conscious sense) persons,” “conservative journals, newspapers,


magazines, and books,” and finally a set of “litmus propositions for Liberal-Conservative test.” While most of the people and publications named were pre-dictable, Burnham’s litmus test was more interesting. Posing a series of true–false questions, Burnham hoped to clarify who was a liberal and who was aconservative by contemplating quandaries that indicated how one viewed theworld. Such statements as “All forms of racial segregation and discriminationare wrong,” “Any interference with free speech and free assembly is wrong,”“There should be no interference with academic freedom,” “Everyone has theright to equal pay for equal work,” and “In deciding who is to be admitted toschools and universities, any quota system based on color, religion, family orsimilar factors is wrong” all attempted to define how people decided how soci-ety worked best. In Burnham’s opinion, “A full-blown Liberal will mark ever[y]one of these thirty-three sentences True. A consistent Conservative will markmany of them, probably a majority and possibly even all of them, False.”50 Likehis contemporaries, Burnham was still hard at work trying to define a set of beliefsthat would allow conservatives to identify themselves and others, thus closingthe political and cultural gap with liberals.

In their small circle Burnham and his colleagues had brought the battle linesinto high relief. Not only were they refining what they believed, but they werebeginning to agree with each other on a number of universalities and, perhapsmost important, were looking for examples in America to justify their ideas. Thegap between theory and reality was shrinking with each new addition to thecanon. Moreover while many of the postwar conservative tenets remained con-sistent from year to year after their initial definitions, their authors and agentsrefused to let them stagnate, applying and reapplying them to situations every-day Americans confronted in their lives. Although circumstances did not con-spire to provide optimal conditions until the late 1950s and early 1960s, conser-vatives were not deterred and continued to search for ways to demonstrate thattheir ideas had consequences. Burnham’s views of foreign policy were perhapsthe most obvious examples of postwar conservatism and how it could revampthe way America responded to a changing world order. By the end of the 1950sconservatives were applying similar beliefs to domestic policy, and although theirvoices were quiet at first, within a few years the handful of advocates had gar-nered millions of adherents. While such conversions were still a relatively longway off in the early to mid-1950s the first steps had been taken, perhaps themost important being the willingness of the Establishment to take conservativeideas seriously. That Burnham became a contender against Kennan, Kirk againstLouis Hartz, Buckley against Lionel Trilling (eventually), Chambers against AlgerHiss, and Moley against Arthur Schlesinger, Jr., meant that these alternatives tothe status quo were beginning to be seen as legitimate alternatives.

Anticommunism sparked the birth of the postwar conservative movement.While the New Deal Democrats had run rampant over Republican challengers


for more years than any conservative cared to remember, without the pressureof communism threatening their way of life, conservatives could have contin-ued living their quiet, isolated existences under Democratic rule. First in theearly and mid-1950s and later again periodically events came in series, wheretheir combined impact created a kind of synergy, which helped the parts addup to much more than the whole. Taken alone, any one of the occurrences wasprobably not enough to cause great alarm. But when one episode was followedwithin weeks or months by another, some Americans questioned the veracity oftheir leaders. In this intersection of policy, individual values, intellectual matu-ration, and the appearance of new leaders, conservatives began to understandthat the waiting had to end and the action had to begin.

Ideologues set the stage in the first half of the 1950s. As their ideas becameaccepted by those who followed politics and were conservative, the fact that lib-erals gave battle to the pioneers meant that if average Americans decided tofollow, they would not be seen as crackpots on the fringe. But what would acti-vate those individuals about whom the intellectuals thought and wrote? Whilespeeches and articles helped, they would never convince voters to do more thansimply accept party politics. For a real conservative change to occur, something(or some things) would have to transform those voters from passive to active,would have to encourage them to demand a new agenda for a new America.While leaders for this movement were not quick to appear, the events that wouldhelp spark such a transformation were just around the corner.

the rise of modern american conservatism a new kind of conservatism: the john birch society 62 ......

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